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Last year the Central Statistics Office came out with an interesting report on non-profit institutions in India and tried to estimate, perhaps for the first time, the value of output produced by this third sector (which is considered, typically, to be outside the state and market). The report was called ‘Non Profit Institutions in India: A Profile and Satellite Accounts in the framework of System of National Accounts (including State-wise Comparison of Profiles)’ and has a lot of data. One that immediately jumps out is the recent boom in registration of these societies. There was a marked increase in the 1990s but the trend has continued even into the 21st century. The following graph illustrates the trends in registration of societies:

Before the 1970s, the claimed purpose of most societies was ‘religion’ (35 percent) but this has declined substantially over the past few decades and today, majority of the societies are registered with a ‘social service’ purpose. There’s also interesting data on the distribution of governing board members and the report notes, “In both rural and urban areas, the number of male governing body members is significantly higher than their female counterpart. The average size of governing body per society is the same i.e. 10 persons, for both rural and urban areas. The overall male-female ratio of governing body members is 3:1. The male-female ratio is almost same in rural and urban areas.” Note: the employment and financial results are based on a survey which could potentially be biased (as only a small subset of the sample was visited and I couldn’t discern if this was a random sample or not).

The National Crime Records Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs publishes an annual report that details various prison statistics. The report presents “numbers and available capacity of different types of jails, strength and training of jail officials and prison budget and expenditure.” In addition, it also analyses the demographic profile of inmates, distribution of convict and under trial prisoners by offenses and sentences / periods of detention and deaths in jails.

In this blog post, I focus on the occupancy rate in prisons. The occupancy rate is calculated as <inmate population/total capacity*100> and a number over 100 implies overcrowding in prisons. For example, an occupancy rate of 115% means that if the total capacity of all prisons in India was 100 then there were 115 prisoners occupying them in 2010. The following spreadsheet details the occupancy rate in Indian prisons over a decade (2001-2010):

Click here to view spreadsheet in separate tab. (To download the data click on the link and go to “File”> “Download as”)

It’s easy to discern that prisons in India have consistently been overcrowded and while the occupancy rate has marginally declined over the last few years, it is still over 100%.

If you are wondering where these prisons are located, here are some prison maps (sourced from the same report):

Today, I wanted to refer to one of the reports of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) and guess what – their website is not available anymore. I understand that the commission was disolved couple of years ago, but why did they have to take down the website? Sigh.

NCEUS came up with some really good work on the informal economy. I am uploading a few (report 3, 10 and working paper 2) that I happen to have. If you have any of the other reports or working papers, please upload them to google docs and send the link to: admin <at> theopendata <dot> com (Thanks!).

Were there any other reports or working paper that I have missed? I vaguely recall a publication on the draft national street vendor policy, but I am not sure if it was by NCEUS. Any help will be appreciated :)

Update (17 Oct 2012): Rahul Nayyar discovered many of the NCEUS reports online. They are on the DCMSME website. [link]